Good morning, everyone. I'm Steve Ferazani. Welcome back to day two of Sidoti's December Virtual Investor Conference. I see people are still coming into the room, so I do want to give everyone a little bit of time for what I think will be an informative and productive 30 minutes. Before I turn it over to our presenter, let me just remind everybody we will have time for Q&A at the end of the presentation. If you have any questions, you just press that Q&A button at the bottom of your box and type them in, and we'll get to as many as we can, time permitting. And I don't want to take up any more time. We're excited to be joined this morning by SPX Technologies. The ticker is SPXC. So happy to turn it over to President and CEO Gene Lowe. Gene, it's all yours.
Thanks, Steve. Why don't we get started? I'll give a little bit of an overview of SPX Technologies, who we are, where we're coming from, and where we're going. We'll target about 20 minutes, and then we'll have about 10 minutes for Q&A. If you start with who we are, as Steve alluded to, SPXC, around $2 billion, two segments, predominantly North American based today. You can see approximately 80% of our revenues are in North America, about 12% in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and about 8% in Asia. You know, one of the things that we've unveiled at our first Investor Day in a couple of years earlier this year was a graphic to really give a feel for where we play and why there's some very nice synergies across our businesses. I'll start with HVAC, which is our larger segment.
You can see we provide a lot of engineered products into a variety of end uses. This is a hospital. This could be a data center, a commercial office building, an airport, a stadium, anywhere where there's needs for larger HVAC equipment. On this graphic, you can see our largest business is cooling towers. We invented the cooling tower approximately 100 years ago. Very strong position there. That's number one. We have a very strong position in boilers and hydronics. You can see electric heat, radiant heat, duct heat, custom air handlers, air exhaust. But really, we play in a lot of niche engineered areas where quality and innovation and performance is particularly valuable. We see this as a very good industry to be in. We see actually a lot of avenues for growth, both organically and inorganically.
If you look in the D&M side on the left, we provide a lot of infrastructure technologies to predominantly cities and organizations that serve cities. So I'll start on the left. Our largest platform is called Location and Inspection. You can see with number one, the person scanning underground. Our scanners were the largest underground scanners in the world. This is for finding underground equipment. This could be electrical products. This could be gas lines. This could be cable lines, things like that, but helping you manage and understand what's underneath the earth that you're digging in. We have a variety of underground robotics. This would be under the trade brand CUES, predominantly for water and wastewater, and ULC Robotics, predominantly for gas. So that really is what encompasses our location and inspection. We have an AtoN segment. That's really obstruction lighting.
This would be for things like windmills, radio towers, TV towers, but also you can see in number six there, we have a marine division. This is really lighting that has typically some communication platform, modem, so forth, and then this is typically managed 24/7 at a NOC, a Network Operations Center, and we do manage a lot of these for our customers. We have a 24 / 7 NOC, which manages these. CommTech, while a lot of our location and inspection scans underground, CommTech is really above ground, really in the auto frequency, and then last but not least, a very strong business in transportation. This is our fare collection business, but I'd say the unifying themes here are engineered products in niche markets with leadership positions, so this slide just gives a little bit more color here.
You can see on HVAC, the relative size approaching $1.4 billion, around 23.5% segment income. D&Ms are on $610 million, around approaching 22% segment income. A couple of points here. We do have a lot of revenue from replacement sales, and we like this. This actually gives us a lot of ballast. You're not dependent on new building activity. Typically, this is replacing the cooling towers or the boilers or your location equipment in the field. So that's a really nice part of our business is we have a very strong amount of our business that comes from replacement. One area we like to point to is sometimes people ask, how would your business perform in a downturn? And COVID is a good example. 2008 is a good example. When COVID hit, we were certainly hit, but having said that, many of our peers were down 20% in revenue.
We were flat in revenue, and that's because a lot of our business is replacement, and a lot of it also has to go through either oftentimes government or quasi-governmental agencies there. The second thing I'd point out is we typically have very strong leadership positions in the markets that we serve. About 90% of our revenue, we are number one or number two in the markets that we serve. You can't really read it great under here, but what you can see is in most of the markets that we participate in, you have very strong trade brands, and so these are very valuable to us. Marley. Marley is a very big, important brand in cooling towers. Radiodetection, Weil-McLain, TAMCO, Ingenia. These are very good brands, and oftentimes, these are the brands that we're known by in the markets that we serve.
We believe we have a very high level of brand equity here, which is a key asset for us and a key advantage. To tear this down a little bit further, overall, at a high level, around $2 billion, around $420 million of EBITDA this year. It's around 21%. A little over $5.50 in EPS, and again, these blue circles in the middle really define the characteristics of the business of who we are. Engineered niches, leading positions, tech-enabled with moats and sustainable, and again, this is just showing revenue by HVAC versus detection and measurement, and then again, breaking down our revenue by geography, so if you look at the trends, where we're coming from and how we've been performing, I think we're on a positive path here. You can see in 2021, our EBITDA was around $161 million. We're approximately $420 million this year.
We've had nice growth there. We've had very strong organic growth, and we've also had some very nice strategic acquisitions that have really strengthened our competitive positions, have been accretive, both in terms of our margins, but also in terms of our growth rate, and you can see how that is translated to EPS, so again, pretty robust CAGR over the past couple of years, and we feel really good about our future. If you go to the next slide, what you'll see is we had not given an Investor Day for five years. Earlier this year, we did give an Investor Day to really lay out what is our strategy for where we're going, and the punchline is we believe we have a path to double our EBITDA once again. 2023, our EBITDA was $310.
As you can see from the prior slide, we've made a lot of progress in moving that a lot higher for 2024, and we see a lot of avenues for driving further growth going forward. What you can see here are the levers that we use to drive growth, and what is our value add? What is our business system? And really, there's a couple of things I'll call out here, so digital, very embedded in everything we do. All of our businesses, you take our detection and measurement businesses. You look 10 years ago, these are largely precision equipment. You look at it today, virtually every product we have comes with software, and we like this because it provides new revenue streams. It also creates a lot of value for the customer and a lot of stickiness.
So once they install our software, typically to track all of the things that we're measuring, we have a very loyal customer and a very high retention rate and very high customer success from that. CI, lean is very important to us. We have lean across all of our operations. It's something that's driven at the top, but we have people embedded across all of our operating centers. We have at any given time between 18 and 20 full-time lean professionals, and then in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 people who have part-time lean jobs, oftentimes in the manufacturing facilities, and it's something that's very important to us to be able to drive throughput, to drive quality, and to drive margin. Talent, critical for us. I think we have very good processes on how we recruit, develop, and retain our talent.
I would view our talent as being a real advantage for us, a real competitive advantage. New product development, the heart and soul of an engineered products business is product management. I would say that I do believe we have come a very long way, and this is really an area of competence for us across our businesses. In the last year, commercial and strategic M&A. I'm going to get into strategic M&A here in a little bit, so I won't spend time on that. Point being, with our business system, we see a lot of avenues to double our EBITDA over the medium term here. Again, this is the framework that we use for our targets. You can see the foundational elements here on the left. These are the areas that we drive our business system.
Really, the punchline is that we want greater than 15% EBITDA growth every year. Now, that is including organic and inorganic. So that 15%, typically, you would see us at a high level as a mid-single digit organic, let's say 4% to 6% organic, and you would push more profit down on the bottom line. You would target to flow that through at a higher rate, and then you augment that with growth investments. I will note, if you look over the past eight years, nine years, I believe we've cleared 20% earnings growth every year except the two COVID years. So our model has had good success, and I believe we have a lot of runway for our model going forward into the future.
So real quick on the HVAC segment, you can see here the way we think about the two platforms there, heating and cooling, a lot of replacement revenue, around 60%. This is predominantly a North American business. I would say our cooling business does have some nice presence and scale in China and Asia, and to a lesser degree in Europe. Most of our heating businesses are really North American focus. And you can see the growth we've had here. Some of that is inorganic, but a lot of the margin growth has been self-help. A lot of lean, a lot of investments in automation and scaling more throughput at some of our manufacturing locations. Most notably, I would say our Olathe, which is outside of Kansas City, are kind of the heart and soul of our cooling business.
Detection and measurement, again, location and inspection is the biggest portion of this business. Then our other three segments make up the remainder. A lot of replacement revenue here. This is a more global business. You do see more revenue in EMEA to some degree, some in Asia. You can see here some steady growth. Then margins having a nice improvement in margins. There's a lot of focus here to get us to the 22 to 24. The team has really made nice progress in those initiatives. We actually feel very good on the path we have there as we look at our initiatives, again, to drive further margin growth. In terms of our balance sheet, we're very disciplined. You can see here we target one and a half to two and a half times. Our businesses generate a lot of cash.
As many of you know, we deployed more than $800 million on three HVAC deals over the past maybe 12 months ago. And you look at it today, we're already anticipated to be below 1.2 x by year-end. So we generate a very high degree of cash, typically conversion rates of the 95% to 100% of net income. And then we're very disciplined in how we manage our balance sheet. You can actually see on the line below how much capital we have deployed over those years, but our model that we've been executing, we've been executing on over the past five years or so. And I'll go through some of how we do M&A, and there's a couple of examples of how we have built our platforms. But these are just some facts about our M&A and our strategic growth program. We've really strengthened our company through M&A.
About $1.6 billion brought in about $650 million. Average or blended margin on that is about 20% EBITDA before synergies. You can see the deal size kind of in that 100 to 150 range. EBITDA multiples, I'd say our blended average for EBITDA multiples is probably in the 11 to 11.5. For larger deals, you'll see a turn or two higher. For smaller deals, you can see a turn or two lower. And we typically extract 1.5x to 2 x of synergy out of these. So you get an average of, let's say, 11x or 11.5x . You can get two turns of synergy. That's a 9.5 x deal. And these were typically for deals that are accretive in margins and accretive in growth rate with very strong technology and competitive positions.
Not only have these deals made us stronger, they've expanded our TM. That's the last point here. I'll walk through a couple of examples of how we've built our platforms here. Engineered Air Movement's a very interesting one. We are very excited about this platform. The way that we got into this is really via Cincinnati Fan. If you think about our cooling tower business, we're very strong in air movement and heat exchange. Cincinnati Fan is really engineered blowers. It's air movement without the heat exchange. With the addition of Cincinnati Fan, which leverages very similar tech, very similar channel, we have been able to layer a number of products, and we've built a very strong business here. I'm very excited about Engineered Air Movement and the opportunities we have in front of us.
Electric heat, we've actually had Marley Engineered Products for decades. A very good business. The acquisition of ASPEQ doubles this business and really gives us more commercial strength, as well as gives us access to the industrial market, which we had not really played in at any scale. So some interesting growth opportunities there. Detection and measurement, again, the punchline here. We started with radio around $90 million. We've layered in a lot of products that go on the truck, a couple of robotics, ground-penetrating radar, and ferrous locators with Schonstedt. And we've built this to a $270 million platform. Again, very exciting business. We see a lot of growth opportunities in location inspection as well. Similarly, aids to navigation. We started with Flash, which is around a $45 million obstruction business.
With the acquisitions of Sealite, Sabik, and ITL, we do believe we are the very strong global leader here, approximately $170 million. And we've diversified geographically as well as end markets. So used to be very strong in obstruction. Now we believe we're the leader in marine, and we have a very nice niche position in the airport space, particularly on the portable side. And so again, another example of how we have built platforms. And so hopefully that'll give a feel for how we think about growing our platforms. Sustainability is very important. I think that one of the things that I think is less known about us is that we have a very strong sustainability portfolio. If you look at what our products do, they really, almost all of them really benefit and really help on sustainability initiatives. And I think we have very good processes.
So something that's very important, we have taken about 30% out of our emissions intensity over the past couple of years, something that we are proud of, and we actually see a lot of opportunities going forward as well. So I'd say that's the summary here. We can open it up to Q&A. We feel good about our model. The punchline is, if you look at what we've been doing the past couple of years, we're not changing our strategy going forward. We are executing a very similar playbook, and we feel like there's a lot of runway here. I would take Mark and Paul off of mute. I think they're going to join me on the Q&A. And Steve, we can get started whenever you're ready.
Absolutely. And in addition to Gene Lowe, we're now joined by Chief Financial Officer Mark Carano and Paul Clegg, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thanks, everyone, for being here. And as a reminder, if you do have questions, we have about 10 minutes remaining. Press that Q&A button and type the question into the screen. Gene, I want to start out by asking about. You showed that slide, just the significant revenue margin and EPS growth consistently over three years. You're not just hitting records and all that. You're smashing records. It's December. Now we want to. What's next? Can you start giving us some sort of an outlook about how this plays into 2025 and how you're thinking about end markets?
That's a great question, Steve. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to delegate that to Mark Carano to kind of lay out how we're thinking about 2025.
to really give guidance, but we need to talk about what we're seeing in end markets and how we're thinking about things.
Yeah, Steve, happy to give you some color there. And yeah, obviously, I'm going to be careful. I'm not giving guidance for 2025. But let's talk about both businesses separately. In the detection and measurement business, just as a reminder for everyone, about two-thirds of that is a run-rate business, and about a third of it is projects business. On the run-rate side, that's been flattish during 2024. It's been sensitive to the regional impacts that you see, the geographies that we participate in. It is a more global business than some of the others. We've seen some strength there, but we've also seen some weakness. As I look into 2025 and I sit here today, I don't really see that dynamic changing.
I see it remaining flat. On the project side, though, we see a lot of very interesting opportunities there across the businesses that touch that. So we're bullish on that opportunity. An example is the Miami project in our Genfare business that there's public disclosure on out there that we have won. It's not in our backlog yet today. But as we look at these projects and the opportunities, really what we're assessing is in what years they're going to fall in. And it feels like more and more may fall into 2026 and 2027 as we look out. So excited about that. But figuring out when these projects actually land and will deliver is something that we're keenly focused on. I would remind, I think everyone, we've talked about this pass-through contract that we've had over the last year and a half.
As I look at 2024, that pass-through contract was worth about $30 million in revenue in our 2024 numbers. This was a one-time opportunity, so to speak. We liked it. It delivered nice EBIT, but it came through at a lower-than-segment margin. So that is not something that we'd expect to continue to have that project going forward. With respect to HVAC, as we look today, we laid out 5% to 6% growth for HVAC for that business as kind of our standard. While it's early, obviously, and we're kind of looking into the year now, I don't really see anything that's going to take us outside of that range. You've got some markets that are really strong, right? Data centers, there's been a lot of press around that. We've talked about that. Healthcare, institutional, those markets are good.
There's other markets like commercial, hospitality, commercial buildings, and the like. I mean, those businesses have been flat on their back this year. I think they'll continue to be flat as we look into next year. So we're not seeing those necessarily. We don't see signs that those are necessarily bouncing back in the near term. And then you've got this industrial tech section. And within industrial, we talk about that as well. Think about chip plants, EV plants, and things of that nature. We're starting to see those push out a little bit. As you think about the demand drivers for electric vehicles and the interest there, obviously, maybe it's not quite as robust as we all thought it would be on the adoption rate.
So while I don't think those projects are necessarily getting canceled, that's not the case, but they're beginning to slide a little bit to the left.
Certainly, we've seen that on the chip side, right? In terms of the construction, labor availability, a lot of that stuff's pushing, right?
Exactly.
When I talk to investors, if it's not the first question I get, it's certainly 1B is really what people are excited about, is how much data centers are and will contribute to your growth. We throw out the power consumption projections from a lot of outside consultants. Can you give us any kind of understanding of how that's playing into you?
I know you've talked 10% of HVAC, how that's playing in and types of growth you can get out of that business that I think a lot of people feel is the driver in 2025, 2026, and maybe how we can modulate that.
Yeah. I think, and I'll start and I'll let Mark or Paul kind of dive in. I think we feel very good about our HVAC position. I'd say there's some things going on that we think are actually going to position us even better as you look ahead to 2026 and 2027. This is actually something that needs to be quite small for us. You're kind of probably talking data centers. We've been in data centers forever, or not forever, but a very long time. And this used to probably be more a $10 to $20 million business. And we've seen this ramp up very dramatically.
We have a very good position in cooling towers. We have a very good position with TAMCO actuated dampers, typically used on the air side, air handling. So we like our positions. And that market, if you look at kind of the put in place, that market's probably a 15% growth if you look at the number of data centers being built every year. And we participate in that as a growth driver on top of that. I would say there are two things that could be beneficial to us. One is the heat load of the chips. So when you use AI chips, they typically generate a lot more heat. And when you need a lot more heat, you need more heat exchange. You need more cooling towers, or you need more air coolers. You need more. We need to reject that heat outside.
And I think while that's still a very small portion of that market, as it gets bigger, that will kind of make our opportunity set larger. The other thing that I would say that's very impactful for us is if you look at it, a data center, there's really three ways you can reject heat. There's cooling towers, there's dry coolers, and then there's adiabatic. Adiabatic is kind of a blend between. It's not as good as cooling towers. It uses a little bit of water, but you get a little bit better performance than just dry coolers, which don't really give you, you burn the most fuel with dry coolers. And so as we've announced this year, I think you're aware, Steve, we've gotten into the adiabatic market. And we actually see that as a large growing market.
We actually have a data center product coming out in 2025, which we've talked about. The product's called the Olympus V, the Olympus V Max. If you come to our ASHRAE, we're positioning to get into market segments that we have not historically competed in. That's really the Adiabatic and to some degree the dry as well. And so we actually think that's some investments we're making for this year that we actually think will benefit 2026 and 2027. So those are two things that we think are going to be net positives for us. And Paul, Mark, what did I miss?
I thought you covered it pretty well there, Gene. I think that's a pretty good summary of what we're looking at.
Okay. I know we don't have a ton of time left. We do have several questions. I do want to group a couple together here.
You've been very successful with M&A over the last seven years. The last one, though, was February of 2024. Those have typically been margin accretive. They've certainly contributed to the margin expansion. You've also had talked about your HVAC margin targets. And you probably got there a lot faster because you've already hit that target. If there are no near-term deals, if HVAC is around the margin level, near-term, what are your expectations? Without guiding, what can you think about with near-term, what you can do on the margin side?
Yeah, Steve, I'll start here. With respect to margins in HVAC, we've done a lot to obviously kind of what we like to say structurally reset those margins so we feel good about where they are today. We provided a range of 21% to 25% at our investor day seven, eight months ago.
So we still feel very confident about that. We're trending to the higher end of that range. And I think if the demand environment remains healthy, the expectations are we would continue to achieve margins towards the high end of that range.
Okay. And then the flip side on the D&M side, where obviously you don't have the pass-through, which helps. You've made significant continuous improvement efforts there.
We have. Yeah. No, we feel good about where we're going with the margin profile of D&M. You're right. We believe there's a path back to this kind of 22% to 24% margin range that we've talked about.
We have a whole host of initiatives that we've talked about on various earnings calls around leveraging what I call both the front end, but probably maybe more importantly, the back end of the D&M segment, everything from leveraging technology, engineering, sourcing, things of that nature where we can drive incremental synergy across those businesses.
We are just about out of time. I do want to give you a chance to provide some closing comments as you come off what is going to be another easily record-setting year. What do you want investors to take away?
From my point of view, I feel really good. I think we have the right team. I do feel we have the right strategy. I do think we're in the early innings here. Our model that we've been executing over the past three, four years, we think there's a lot of runway.
I would say M&A activity is high.
It is.
We actually feel very good about the pipeline and the opportunity set. As Paul and Mark alluded to, the markets, I would say, are mixed in certain areas. There are certain areas of a lot of strength, some with a little bit of strength. But in general, we feel very good about where we're going. And yeah, Paul or Mark, anything you'd like to add as you kind of think about looking forward?
Yeah, I think now you hit it, Gene. I mean, we're excited about where we can continue to grow this business inorganically. And as you referenced, it's been a year or so since we've done a deal. We continue to be very active there, but also disciplined.
Excellent. Gene Lowe, Mark Carano, Paul Clegg from SPX Technologies. Thanks so much for being here.
Hopefully, it was an informative half hour for everyone, and thank you all for being here. Appreciate it.
Thanks, you. Thanks, Steve.